The End is Near! Visions of Apocalypse, Millennium, and Utopia

The End is Near! Visions of Apocalypse, Millennium, and Utopia

17.5034.95

The End is Near! maps the fervor haunting the human consciousness as the Millennium’s final hour approaches. Will it mean the dawning of a new Utopia or a terrifying descent into apocalyptic chaos? An unprecedented group of noted thinkers, from His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Stephen Jay Gould to Reverend Howard Finster and Apocalypse culture expert ,Adam Parfrey, joins dozens of world-renowned visionary artists in wrestling with the answer.

Encounter the works of artists who often dewll on the shadowy fringes of societythe recluses, the disenfranchised, the institutionalized, and the wildly eccentric brought together by curator, Roger Manley, for an amazing exhibition at the American Visionary Art Museum, the world’s largest ever mounted on the subjects of Apocalypse, Millennium, and Utiopia.

Sumptuously illustrated with full-color reproductions throughout, The End is Near! provides a fascinating look at the sometimes shocking, always inspired imagery of our charged times.

Winner of the 1998 Benjamin Franklin National Book Award for Best First Book

“The obsessiveness, the intensity and yes, sometimes the just plain madnss that characterize what’s called outsider art also account for its extraordinary vitality and the direct impact of these images on the viewer. There’s no polite art-museum glimpsing of this work. It smacks you in the eyes. Just in book form there are many frightening, depressing or exalting visions here. If nothing else, The End is Near should put to rest any questions of whether “outsider” art should be studied, collected or shown in museums at all. “

– John Strausbaugh, New York Press

“The perfect Christmas gift for John Waters. A revelation from beginning to end.”

– Flaunt Magazine

“This book is recommended for all art collections.”

– Margaret Gross, Library Journal

“Without question the slickest, classiest, hippest, heaviest, headiest Outsider Art publication of the yea. One might be tempted to call it the contemporary Zeitgeist of Outsider Art.”